Tag: ibs

Mucous in the Stool

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Why is there mucous in your poop?

Have you ever looked (we all look, it’s normal) at your poop and thought – what IS that? If there’s a jellylike substance (it looks like snot in the toilet bowl) in the stool, it could be an indication that there’s an infection in the bowel.

There are levels of intensity when we’re addressing mucous in the stool:

Mild: Small amount, occasional mucous. This indicates a mild overgrowth of non-pathogenic (meaning not disease-causing), non-commensal (meaning not the good bacteria) bacteria or yeast in the bowel. This is typically seen in patients with bloating, irregular bowel movements and other IBS symptoms. I address this using antimicrobial herbs and supplements for a short time frame, plus a well-balanced probiotic.

Moderate: Moderate amount, frequent mucous. This indicates a more aggressive overgrowth of non-pathogenic, non-commensal bacteria or yeast in the small or large bowel. This is seen in patients with more severe IBS and sometimes in SIBO (Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth) and may require lab testing prior to deciding on the appropriate treatment approach.

Severe: Large amounts with severe diarrhea. This indicates a pathogenic (disease-causing) infection. This is seen in patients with a harmful infection, often traveller’s diarrhea or a parasitic infection. If you are experiencing this type of symptoms, please see your MD, ask for a stool sample, and you may need antibiotics (yes, I do support antibiotics when necessary). Follow up with your Naturopathic Doctor to replenish the gut flora with good bacteria, help with gut healing, and determine the best nutrition protocol during and after treatment.

Red flag: If there is bloody mucous in the stool, we’ll send you for fecal calprotectin testing and/or a colonoscopy, as blood is a risk factor for more serious conditions like Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.

Other causes: If infection isn’t the cause, it could be another underlying condition such as Celiac disease or a liver or gall bladder issue causing a malabsorption of fats (often mistaken for mucous). A full assessment of the rest of your bowel habits helps us to narrow this down so that we can send you for appropriate lab testing.

We can learn a lot from asking about bowel habits! Asking about mucous in the stool is only one of my 10 questions that I ask every patient about their bowel health.

Here’s the full list:

  • Is there mucous in your stool?
  • Is there blood in your stool?
  • Is there undigested food (other than corn) in your stool?
  • How many bowel movements to you have per day?
  • Do you feel fully evacuated?
  • Shape: Is the stool well formed / pelleted / liquid etc. ? *Bristol stool chart helps!
  • Do you experience urgency?
  • Do you have abdominal pain, or pain on passing a bowel movement?
  • Do you feel gassy?
  • Do you experience bloating?

Book your appointment to address your digestive symptoms, because a happy gut is the foundation of a healthy body.

Stress & Digestion

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Why does stress affect digestion?

We all know the feeling of having butterflies in our stomach or feeling nauseous when we’re worried, but why does that happen?

When we’re feeling stressed, anxious, overwhelmed or upset, our bodies are in a sympathetic nervous system state. This is more commonly known as “fight or flight”.

During stressful situations, we release a cocktail of hormones that instructs the body to reroute blood flow from “unnecessary” to “critical to survival” areas of the body. This includes taking blood flow away from digestive organs and sending it to the heart, lungs, and large muscles. From a survival perspective, this makes sense: let’s focus on running from a lion now and we can deal with digestion later.

The problem is that if we’re feeling stressed for a prolonged period of time, our digestion suffers long term consequences:

  • Stomach: Lack of production of digestive enzymes and stomach acid leads to nausea, heartburn or indigestion.
  • Small intestine: If we don’t break down foods well in the stomach AND we have a lack of blood flow to the intestinal tract, we poorly absorb nutrients. This leads to fatigue and other symptoms of nutrient deficiency like brittle hair and nails, headaches, and muscle tension.
  • Large intestine: Poorly broken-down foods become hyper fermented by our gut flora. This leads to bloating and leaky gut.
  • Motility: The normal action of moving food through the digestive tract in a healthy time frame with proper bowel movements is affected. This can cause diarrhea in some people and constipation in others.

Long term stress has other impacts on how our digestion moves, too. It can slow our metabolic rate (causing constipation) through slowing thyroid function. Stress also alters our gut microbiome, impacting our immune system, mood, and appetite. Suffice it to say that stress has a huge impact on our digestion as the foundation of overall health!

So, what do we do?

  1. The opposite of “fight or flight” is “rest and digest”. The key is that you can’t be in both nervous system states at the same time. When you’re feeling stressed, worried, or if you notice that your digestion has been off lately, try taking a few moments before you eat to take five slow, controlled, deep breaths. This pulls you out of fight or flight and moves you into rest and digest.
  2. Focus on your meals. Avoid screens, phones, and other distractions while eating. Sit down and enjoy your food! Eating with others is helpful for the digestive process because keep us relaxed and focused on the meal.
  3. Engage in restorative and restful activities throughout the day. Remember that digestion isn’t just happening while we’re eating, it’s a continual process.
  4. Don’t work out too much. Intense workouts put our bodies back into fight or flight. Make sure your workouts are challenging but not exhausting. A good rule is that if you’re sore two days after a workout, you’ve pushed too far.
  5. Get a good sleep. Sleep inhibits our stress hormones. When we’re more tired, we feel more anxious and irritable, and this is because our stress hormones weren’t sufficiently lowered during sleep. Click here for more tips on sleep.
  6. Seek out support for coping with stress and anxiety. Dr. Chambers may use herbs and/or supplements, adjust your nutrition, improve your sleep and provide stress coping tools to help reduce stress.
  7. Uncover what else may be sabotaging your digestion. Food intolerances, IBS, thyroid issues, candida overgrowth and SIBO are all conditions impact our digestion and are made worse with stress.

Book an appointment to address the underlying cause of your digestive concerns, learn to cope with stress, and get you on the path to great digestion even in the face of stressful circumstances.

Top 5 Marketing Traps

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Marketing can be sneaky and misleading! These are the most commonly de-bunked marketing myths I see in my office. Let’s dig into each so that we can understand why these fads are not as healthy as they’re made-out to be.

Probiotic yogurt aids digestion – FALSE

Probiotic yogurt like Activia have convinced us that eating these foods helps build a healthy gut microbiome. To put it bluntly… they don’t! The strain “B. regularis” is not a research-driven strain of bacteria that is part of a healthy microbiome.

Kombucha is healthy for gut flora – FALSE

Kombucha is a fermented tea made with yeast culture. If you have #digestion issues like IBS, Crohn’s or colitis it’s important to be mindful of the types of bacteria you’re introducing into your system. The yeast cultures in kombucha can be like adding fuel to the fire if our gut microbiome isn’t already in a healthy place.

Diet soda is better than regular – FALSE

Diet soda is made sweet with artificial sweeteners that have been shown to be linked to cancer. Research also shows diet soda negatively alters the gut flora within hours of drinking even one can. Interestingly, research also shows that people who consume artificial sweeteners typically eat more total sugar in a day than those who do not because the tongue tells the brain to expect calories that never arrive, so in turn, we crave more sugar.

Lactose-free doesn’t cause indigestion – FALSE

Lactose free dairy IS helpful for people who genetically don’t have the “scissors” needed to snip a lactose sugar molecule in half; you know who you are, my lactose intolerant friends! This is DIFFERENT from someone who has an inflammatory response (aka food sensitivity) to the PROTEINS (not lactose sugar) in dairy. If you have IBS, bloating, IBD or heartburn, simply avoiding lactose isn’t enough because your body reacts to the proteins found in dairy and those are still present in lactose-free products. Simply put: it’s an immune system issue, not a sugar-scissors issue.

Gluten-free is always healthier – FALSE

I’m all for living a gluten free life, however a lot of gluten free products are very high in sugar and other additives. Always read labels to make sure sugar content is as low as possible. More importantly, try to buy whole-food substitutions instead of look-alike products. For example, quinoa, GF oats, lentils, sweet potato and squash are all healthy whole-food sources of GF complex carbs.

The world of online nutrition advice can be tough to navigate, so peer-reviewed research studies are always my go-to for getting to the truth!

Book your apportionment and we’ll create a meal plan based on your personal nutritional needs and preferences.

Lectins: Eat or avoid?

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What is a Lectin?

Lectins are molecules found in beans, peanuts, soybeans, lentils, and wheat. Lectins can bind to human tissues if we have a compromised gut barrier (I don’t love the term leaky gut but it helps us understand the concept here).

Once a lectin is bound to your body’s tissues, your immune system sees it as a “red flag” and mistakenly mounts an attack against those tissues. This attack is better known as autoimmunity, and can be part of what causes autoimmune disease. Wherever we see an attack, we see inflammation, and often pain and dysfunction in that area of the body.

Lectin-associated autoimmune symptoms are most frequently seen as joint pain / rheumatoid arthritis, and intestinal barrier disorders Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, Celiac disease, SIBO, and IBS.

How do I know if I should avoid lectins?

There are two ways to know if lectins are contributing to symptoms:

  1. Do a Food Intolerance Test to see if there is an immune system response to lectin-containing foods. If one comes up and symptoms are severe, I typically remove all lectin-family foods.
  1. Remove lectins (along with other food triggers) and see if symptoms improve. This can take up to 3 months for full resolution, but we typically see improvement within 2-4 weeks.

Lectins are just a small part of addressing digestive concerns. Book an appointment to address the intestinal barrier, microbiome and other food triggers as part of your overall plan to get your digestive health back on track.

Acne

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Our complexion is a reflection of what is happening inside the body. If we’re relying on topical acne treatments alone, we’re usually not addressing the underlying cause of breakouts, and they keep coming back.

The difficult, and often frustrating, thing about acne is that it can be caused by many different factors. Let’s dig deeper into the most common causes of acne:

Food Intolerances

Reactions to foods cause inflammation in the body. Acne caused by this inflammatory response to foods is often seen on the forehead and cheeks, and present as small bumps that can look almost rash-like. Testing for food intolerances can be done through blood work to assess which foods are causing the most inflammation. Food intolerance testing gives us a road-map of which foods to minimize or eliminate from the diet, as well as provides indicators about your overall gut-health. Read more about food intolerances.

Hormone Imbalance

Hormonal acne tends to be around the jawline and chin, and presents as deep, cystic, and painful. This type of acne is more common in women, and it is often accompanied by irregular or heavy periods. However, men with high testosterone levels may also experience hormonal acne. Blood work can help us determine if cystic acne is being caused by high testosterone (as we often see in PCOS), estrogen dominance, or high progesterone levels.

Treatment may involve managing PCOS through nutrition and supplements, supporting liver detoxification of hormones, or balancing the estrogen-progesterone relationship.

Constipation or IBS

You should be having at least one fully evacuated bowel movement per day. If not, your body is not effectively eliminating toxins and waste from the bowel, so instead, it comes out in the skin. Breakouts can be anywhere on the face, and pimples tend to be red with a whitehead.

Treatment may involve assessing the gut flora, increasing fibre and water, and using supplements (not laxatives!) to promote regularity. Learn more about constipation and IBS.

Unhealthy Gut Flora

If you have had many rounds of antibiotics, eat poorly (processed foods and sugar), are stressed, or have taken certain medications, chances are that your healthy gut bacteria have been harmed, and unhealthy strains of bacteria and yeast (aka Candida) have taken their place. An unhealthy gut microbiome causes increased inflammation in the body, which can present as acne. Other hints that may have an unhealthy gut microbiome include bloating, indigestion, mucous in the stool, fatigue, and/or vaginal yeast infections.

There are many other factors that can contribute to acne that should also always be addressed as part of an acne treatment plan, including:

  • Stress and anxiety
  • Not drinking enough water
  • Liver over-burden (alcohol, cigarettes, fatty liver disease)
  • Nutrient deficiencies (zinc, vitamin A)
  • Sugar and/or dairy intake

The bottom line is that it’s important to look at acne as a signal that there is another issue happening in the body. If our body processes are all working well, we shouldn’t be experiencing more than the occasional pimple!

Book an appointment to assess and treat the underlying cause(s) of your breakouts. Let’s take control of your acne!